Our CAP accredited Biobank provides human biospecimens with annotated clinical data to the research community. The Biobank’s goal is to aid in the characterization of disease, improve disease detection and patient therapies, and advance science and personalized medicine.

Excess surgical tissue and other biospecimens that would otherwise be discarded are de-identified, processed, preserved, and stored for distribution to research scientists across MaineHealth, academic institutions, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, and commercial specimen repositories

More than 100,000 human samples with annotated data collected primarily from cancer and inflammatory disease surgeries.

Human Biospecimens-banked and prospective collections:

  • Fresh tissue and biospecimens (tissue, whole blood, serum, plasma, ascites, swabs, saliva, etc.)
    • Custom processing available
  • Frozen tissue
  • Frozen serum/plasma
  • Formalin fixed-paraffin embedded (FFPE)
  • Frozen OCT

Custom specimen collections and processing

Histology Services

MaineHealth Biobank operates under an Institutional Review Board (IRB) approved protocol and is overseen by the MaineHealth Research Compliance Office

MaineHealth Biobank is accredited by the College of American Pathologists (CAP) and its operations are guided by National Cancer Institute Best Practices for Biospecimen Resources and by the International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories (ISBER) Best Practices: Recommendations for Repositories.

Questions? Email Biobank@MaineHealth.org

CAP accreditation is an internationally recognized, voluntary laboratory accreditation program offered by the College of American Pathologists (CAP) to promote quality in laboratory testing. This “gold standard” accreditation involves a rigorous, peer-based, on-site inspection every two years, where multidisciplinary teams use detailed checklists to ensure a lab meets the highest standards for accurate test results, patient care, and safety